IBM’s use of artificial intelligence, especially AI agents, has resulted in the hiring of more employees as opposed to a reduction in workforce, the tech giant’s CEO Arvind Krishna has said recently.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Krishna accepted that IBM has used artificial intelligence “to replace the work of a couple hundred human resources workers”.
Krishna told the newspaper that investing in AI has enabled IBM to invest more in other areas as well and focus on them.
“While we have done a huge amount of work inside IBM on leveraging AI and automation on certain enterprise workflows, our total employment has actually gone up, because what it does is it gives you more investment to put into other areas,” WSJ quoted the IBM CEO as saying.
These areas include software engineering, sales and marketing, and are dubbed by Krishna as “critical thinking” focused domains. As per the CEO, people in these domains need to do things that “face up or against other humans, as opposed to just doing rote process work.”
However, he did not reveal over which period IBM let its employees go, in order to invest in AI.
Arvind Krishna further told WSJ that the services of IBM are meant to be additive “because they can work with AI agents customers might be using from those vendors.”
Similar to its approach to let customers use their cloud-computing provider, IBM is putting in place a “we want you to use what’s appropriate” attitude towards AI, Krishna said.
IBM CEO on Trump tariffs
Speaking on Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that the impact of the levies on his company’s business is ‘very limited’.
This is partly because IBM’s mainframe computers and quantum systems are already manufactured in the US. However, a slump in demand as a result of the tariffs could hit discretionary spending in the company’s consulting business, Krishna said.
“If the impact is within three to four percent, you actually can grit and manage through it,” he was quoted as saying by WSJ.
“If the impact is going to be more like 10 per cent, then that requires a lot more hardheaded management decisions,” the IBM CEO added.
In April, IBM said it is planning to invest $150 billion in the US over the next five years.